Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa: National Fire Services Indaba

Remarks by Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa at the National Fire Services Indaba Premier Hotel, Bloemfontein 27 February 2026 

Indaba theme: Building Resilient Communities: Collaborative Strategies For Fire Risk

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Honourable Premier of the Free State, the MMC for CoGTA, MMC Cllr Kruger, representing the Executive Mayor, our Royalty, Programme Director, Heads of the National Disaster
Management Centre and Provincial Disaster Management Centres, Chief Fire Officers, leaders from SALGA and the Fire Protection Associations, partners from the private sector and civil society, distinguished guests, and members of our fire services family, thank you for the honour

of addressing you at this National Fire Services Indaba in Bloemfontein. We gather at a time when the country’s fire risk environment is intensifying and becoming more complex. South Africa has just lived through one of its deadliest wildfire seasons in recent memory: thirty-four lives lost, nearly four million hectares burned, thousands of livestock destroyed, and significant infrastructure damage, as clear reminders that this is not a seasonal inconvenience, but a national resilience challenge that demands system-wide action. These losses translate directly into disrupted livelihoods, fiscal pressure on municipalities, and deep social trauma that can take years to heal. They also come in a global context in which climatedriven wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity, with heightened fatalities across regions and sustained periods of air-quality exceedances affecting millions of people. We are part of that world, and we must plan accordingly.

This Indaba was conceived precisely to place that urgency under the national spotlight and to consolidate the partnerships required to proactively reduce fire risk. The theme, building resilient communities through collaborative strategies for fire risk reduction, signals a deliberate shift away from a narrow response mindset to a prevention-led, predictive, and coordinated approach. This shift is fully aligned with the policy direction communicated in our recent public briefings: reduce vulnerability, strengthen state capability, and embed disaster resilience in local development. It is also entirely consistent with the developmental priorities of the National Development Plan for safer communities and capable institutions.

When we met at the last gathering, we committed to repositioning fire services in South Africa and to grounding that repositioning in a Strategic Roadmap to 2030. Since then, the National Disaster Management Centre has completed a far-reaching consultation process across provinces, SALGA platforms, and specialised sector forums. That process produced a countrywide picture of the strengths we can build upon, the gaps we must close, and the reforms we must accelerate, ranging from legislative modernisation and governance alignment to capacity building and a realistic funding model. These engagements have not been academic; they are the scaffolding for implementation.

Let me begin with an acknowledgement. Firefighters are among the most visible expressions of government at work. When the siren sounds, and a red engine moves through our streets, the public sees the state arriving, not a department, not a sphere of government, but the state itself. That moment carries a weight of expectation that few professions shoulder. This is why we are investing in a governance and delivery framework that supports you to do your work safely, effectively, and predictably. It is also why we insist that our systems must pivot toward prevention. The most effective fire is the one that never starts, and the best response is the one made unnecessary by prudent planning, risk-informed settlement design, and sustained community awareness. This is the direction we set in the Roadmap, and we must now embed it across all municipalities.

Across the SALGA consultations last year, we heard strong endorsement of the 2030 Strategic Roadmap and consistent, candid messages about what is holding municipalities back. Stakeholders highlighted persistent capacity gaps, from staffing levels and qualifications to equipment shortfalls and limited enforcement of fire safety bylaws. They flagged the structural funding problem, the fire services’ expected delivery on national priorities without commensurate budgetary support. They called for an explicit funding model, potentially including a conditional grant or formula adjustments that recognise the essential nature of this function. They also pointed to the unevenness that now characterises the system: metros and larger municipalities are significantly ahead on infrastructure and technology. In contrast, rural and under-resourced municipalities remain trapped in a low-capacity cycle. These are not matters of opinion; they are widely observed realities that demand practical solutions.

The National Treasury and NDMC’s engagement in April last year helped crystallise a workable path forward. Treasury recognised the criticality of fire services to municipal functioning and welcomed a structured, phased approach to funding: first, a rigorous national gap analysis to quantify needs; then interim measures; and ultimately a longer-term, sustainable solution routed through the MTEF process. The joint resolutions include establishing a national working group with Treasury, NDMC and SALGA; aligning parallel efforts to avoid duplication; and ensuring that formal submissions are prepared for the 2026 budget cycle. This is the kind of sober, systems-level partnership that produces durable outcomes and that can carry the reformfrom paper to practice.

The re-establishment of the Fire Brigade Services Board in May last year, its first sitting in over seventeen years, has restored an essential statutory instrument for national leadership, technical coordination and sector standards. That meeting was more than symbolic; it reopened the formal channel for advising the Minister on training recognition, national benchmarks, and systemic reforms. The Board’s agenda cuts across the issues that have hampered progress for too long: clarifying legislative gaps, engaging on a realistic funding model, standardising competencies, and ensuring that national norms are actually used. The Board’s revival marks a return to coordinated, statutory oversight, something our fire services have urgently needed. Legislative modernisation must now move in step with these governance instruments. The Fire Brigade Services Act of 1987 has been outpaced by the realities our municipalities face. The Draft Fire Services Bill, included in the CoGTA legislative programme for the 2026/27 financial year, aims to provide a modern framework that clarifies roles across spheres, standardizes performance expectations, and supports professionalisation. It also seeks to align the broader regulatory ecosystem, ensuring that national standards inform training, equipment, risk assessments, response times, and reporting. This is part of repositioning the function in a risk environment shaped by rapid urbanisation, growth in informal settlements, the expansion of the wildland-urban interface, and climate variability.

The risk is not static. Scientific evidence shows an expanding window of high-fire-danger days and rising heat extremes, exactly the conditions that elevate fire intensity and complicate suppression. Studies focusing on southern African savannas project more frequent hot, dry, windy conditions that favour rapid fire spread. At the same time, our own disaster and climate risk assessments confirm that climate change is acting as a risk multiplier across multiple hazards. The result is longer fire seasons, higher-intensity events, and greater strain on response systems, particularly in municipalities already struggling with capacity. Planning that does not account for this trend line will fail.

Against that backdrop, the Roadmap’s implementation work must be equally dynamic. Provinces have submitted status reports that provide a first national picture of municipal fire service capacity. Those reports are now the basis for province-specific Fire Services Recovery Packages, practical, sequenced plans to stabilise core capacity, invest in training and equipment, strengthen fire safety enforcement, and integrate modern tools for risk profiling and early warning. This is how we will move from a national strategy to district-level execution. It is how we will replace episodic, crisis-driven interventions with steady, structured improvements that communities can actually feel.

We will also strengthen the partnership architecture that carries these reforms. Effective fire risk reduction is inherently multi-sectoral. National, provincial and municipal governments must be in lockstep, but our reach must extend further, into Fire Protection Associations, insurers and risk-engineering partners, research institutions, and community-based structures. TheNprivate sector brings not only resources but also innovation in data, geospatial analytics, communications technologies and predictive tooling. Our partnerships with the risk and resilience programmes in the insurance sector, with the Fire Protection Association of Southern Africa, and with academic consortia that maintain national risk layers and vulnerability analyses, will be scaled up because they demonstrably improve targeting and outcomes.

This Indaba’s programme has been constructed to connect these dots. Day 1 addressed the governance and legislative mandate, the incident management system, and a conceptual model for municipal fire and emergency services. Day 2 places the Ministerial address after the Premier’s opening precisely so that the policy frame can meet the technical content that follows: panel discussions on intergovernmental coordination for wildfires, public interest partnerships, geospatial intelligence for fire response planning, and lessons from large-scale exercises. The sequencing is deliberate: political leadership must set direction; technical leadership must translate that direction into operating doctrine and practice; and we must then close the loop by locking in commitments, resolutions, and reporting timelines. That is what the adoption of Indaba resolutions at the end of this programme is designed to achieve.

Allow me to situate our approach in one additional frame that we are embedding across municipalities: good governance happens before the audit, not after it. Just as clean audits in local government come from prevention and daily control, safe communities come from prevention and daily discipline in risk reduction. This is the logic behind the Ten-by-Ten approach we have introduced with the Auditor-General, which holds that when ten essential internal controls are firmly in place across ten critical governance areas, the probability of clean, sustainable outcomes rises sharply. Translated into the fire services context, that means leadership accountability that supports fire safety enforcement; disciplined financial management that funds maintenance, training and equipment; lawful supply-chain practices that prevent delays and non-compliant procurements; accurate record-keeping for investigations and performance; credible risk-based planning; active risk management; a respected internal audit function; rigorous, functional audit committees; and real consequence management. Prevention is more effective than correction. Systems that are strong on ordinary days are the ones that hold under extraordinary pressure.

Prevention also means facing the urban realities that generate fire risk squarely. Informal settlement fires extract a terrible human cost and are among the most challenging incidents our services face. If we are serious about saving lives, we must bring fire services to the planning table when land is released, when settlements are upgraded, and when basic services are designed. Street layout, vehicle access, hydrant spacing, electrification standards, and community awareness are not afterthoughts; they are the difference between a contained incident and a neighbourhood catastrophe. The District Development Model gives us the platform to do this, and the White Paper on Fire Services sets the strategic intent. The Indaba’s own public communication has framed this shift from reactive responses to proactive, prevention-led, and predictive approaches; our task is to turn that intent into district-level practice, with measurable reductions in fire incidents and losses.

Climate-driven veldfires demand the same integrative posture. Municipal fire services and Fire Protection Associations must plan together, train together and operate jointly, with Disaster Management Centres coordinating early warnings and resource surge when thresholds are reached. Data from national and international assessments show that fire seasons are lengthening, heat extremes are becoming more frequent, and high fire-danger days are becoming more common. In such conditions, stovepipes fail. Only integrated command, shared situational awareness, and pre-planned mutual aid will keep pace with the hazard.

The technology exists to support this shift. Early-warning platforms and geospatial risk layers can now be integrated at the municipal scale to identify ignition hotspots, model spread, and preposition resources. Communications platforms can speed up call-taking and dispatch, while data dashboards can show trends in near-real time for decision-makers. The Roadmap envisages a national fire services dashboard under NDMC oversight to standardize performance monitoring. Where municipalities have embraced this data-driven approach, they are already seeing improvements in response times, in targeted prevention campaigns, and in the credibility of the public information they release. We will accelerate this work because it turns abstract risk into actionable intelligence.

I want to return briefly to the legislative pathway. The Fire Brigade Services Act was crafted in a very different era; it does not adequately reflect the constitutional allocation of functions, the realities of modern urban growth, or the development of private fire services operating in municipal spaces. Reports to the Fire Brigade Board recommend that we update the law to appropriately regulate private service provision, clarify jurisdictional responsibilities between district and local municipalities, recognise fire services explicitly as a basic service, and adopt core national standards, such as SANS 10090, into regulation so that performance benchmarks are clear and enforceable. These are not bureaucratic exercises; they are essential to closing the governance gap. We must move from flexibility without clarity to clarity with accountability.

Legislation alone will not change outcomes, which is why our emphasis on capacity remains central. The NDMC and provincial departments will intensify training, certification pathways and leadership development for our services, especially for municipalities outside the metros, so that every community can rely on a professional crew arriving with the right competencies.

We will also engage with institutions of higher learning to ensure a pipeline of skilled professionals in fire engineering, risk analysis, and emergency management. Professionalisation is the bedrock of safe operations and trusted services. We must also acknowledge the human cost borne by firefighters and their families. The 2024 season’s fatalities are a national wound. We honour those who paid the ultimate price. Their memory obliges us to do everything possible to make the operating environment safer: from station design and crew rotations to equipment standards, incident termination protocols, and mental-health support for responders. When we speak of resilience, we must include the

resilience of the people behind the uniform. Allow me to close with three commitments that I believe this Indaba can lock in. First, we must move decisively from strategy to implementation on the 2030 Roadmap. Province-specific recovery packages must be the instrument for translating national intent into local action, and they must be sequenced, funded, and monitored. We will use the Board to maintain national coordination and keep the reform agenda coherent. We will report back publicly on progress, because transparency drives performance.

Second, we must accelerate the legislative modernisation needed to underpin the system we want. The Draft Fire Services Bill’s inclusion in the 2026/27 legislative programme gives us a defined window to consult, refine and table a law that reflects today’s risks and tomorrow’s demands. We will ensure that standards, roles and funding architecture align, and that the law supports professionalisation and accountability across the three spheres. Third, we will carry through the prevention-led shift that this Indaba and our public communications have placed at the centre of our agenda. We will bring fire services into spatial and service-delivery planning, particularly for informal settlement upgrades; we will deepen partnerships for data, technology, and community awareness; and we will strengthen the intergovernmental muscle memory required to handle long, intense fire seasons under a changing climate. The result we seek is not a set of conferences and reports. The result we seek is fewer funerals, fewer families displaced, fewer livelihoods lost, and a measurable reduction in the frequency and severity of fires across our communities.

I want to thank the Premier and the province for their partnership in hosting us; the Executive Mayor and the City for their support; the NDMC team for convening and sustaining this platform; SALGA for ensuring that municipal voices shape the work; the Fire Brigade Services Board for returning national leadership to where it belongs; and every firefighter, manager, trainer, dispatcher, inspector and volunteer who keeps our communities safe.

We often say that resilient communities are not built by accident. They are built by choice, by daily discipline, by institutions that work, by leaders who cooperate, and by professionals who never give up. If we carry that spirit beyond this room, then this Indaba will have achieved its purpose. South Africa can and will build communities that are better prepared, better protected and more resilient to fire risk. Together, national, provincial, local, public and private, we will

make that a reality.

I thank you.

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